Author: Dan Kennedy

Younger drivers are a bigger problem

We have become obsessed with elderly drivers. Today’s example: this story in the Boston Globe about an 83-year-old woman who crashed through the front of a Natick liquor store. My guess is that it wouldn’t even have made the Globe a year ago.

To be sure, there are elderly drivers who should be off the road. But it’s long been known that younger drivers are more dangerous than older ones. That perspective has been entirely lacking from recent coverage.

In 2001, for instance, the Washington Post reported that the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety had found that older drivers were involved in fewer crashes than any other age group, but that the fatality rate in those crashes was higher because the elderly drivers themselves were more likely to die of their injuries. From the Post:

The studies show that older drivers kill fewer motorists and pedestrians than any other age group and have the lowest crash rates per licensed driver….

Younger drivers aged 16 to 24 had the highest accident rate, more than double the rate for older drivers.

My 95-year-old uncle continues to drive. I know that anecdotal evidence is suspect, but I think his sense of responsibility is typical of his generation. He no longer drives at night, and he’s talked about public-transportation options for the day that he should give up his license.

More-frequent testing for older drivers is probably a good idea. But coverage has grown completely out of proportion when you consider the reality of who’s the greatest menace behind the wheel.

Loth signs off — for now

Boston Globe editorial-page editor Renée Loth marks her departure with a classy farewell. Good to see she’s going to write her new weekly column a short walk away from the Statehouse. Local politics has always been her passion, and her scrutiny will be welcome.

A few pieces of unsolicited advice for Loth: (1) start a blog; (2) use it, along with Twitter and Facebook, to converse with your readers; (3) learn how to shoot and edit Web video. Not only will such activities not detract from your column, but they’ll end up giving you more material than you’d have otherwise.

A new threat to the Internet

In my latest for the Guardian, I consider the implications of an idea put forth recently by influential U.S. Court of Appeals Judge Richard Posner: making it illegal to link to copyrighted content without permission. Not only would Posner’s proposal do enormous damage to the Internet, but it would destroy the doctrine of “fair use” as well.

NPR ombudsman Shepard responds

NPR ombudsman Alicia Shepard has responded to my item of last week in which I criticized her for defending NPR’s policy of refusing to refer to waterboarding as “torture.” She writes:

Yes, President Obama and AG Eric Holder have said that waterboarding was torture. I’d personally call it torture. But if you were an editor at the Globe, would you say that someone tortured another person? Or would you want to use a direct or indirect quote, i.e., “John Smith said the guard tortured him”?

I’m not trying to say what is and is not torture, but is every abuse classified as torture now or are there degrees? When a police officer throws a suspect to the ground and handcuffs them, is that torture or simply abuse?

Would it be better to, say, describe the technique and then say some call it torture? I do not think enhanced interrogation techniques is acceptable either. That’s why I come down on describing the technique and adding that some call it torture.

Shepard asks, so I’ll attempt a few answers.

I’m not sure what Shepard thinks there is to gain by skiing down the slippery slope from waterboarding to getting rough with a suspect during an arrest. In my original item, I strictly limited my remarks to waterboarding, recognized as torture by just about everyone on the planet.

The opinions of Obama and Holder are entirely unnecessary to determining whether waterboarding is torture.

As John McCain and others have pointed out, the United States executed several Japanese military officers for waterboarding American prisoners of war after World War II. And as I wrote last week, if NPR really can’t bring itself to use the T-word, perhaps it can describe waterboarding as “an interrogation technique once considered so heinous by the United States that it hanged Japanese officers for doing it to Americans.”

So yes, if I were an editor at the Boston Globe, you’re damn right I would refer to waterboarding as torture. That seems about as solid as referring to oil as a fossil fuel, or baseball as a sport. By eschewing the term “torture” to describe a practice that the entire international community regards as such, NPR is not being neutral. Rather, it is embracing a euphemism that places the network squarely on the side of the torturers and their enablers.

NPR should not use enhanced interrogation techniques on the English language.

Thursday update: I was not as precise as I wanted to be when I wrote about “everyone on the planet,” as I was in a rush and had lousy Internet access. Last week, Bob Garfield of “On the Media” interviewed Shepard and made the point I was trying to make:

The U.N.’s High Commissioner for Human Rights says that waterboarding is torture. The International Committee of the Red Cross have called what the U.S. did “torture.” Waterboarding is unambiguously in violation of the International Convention on Torture, which has been ratified by 140-some countries.

The United States is among those 140 countries, but, as the Associated Press reported in 2002, the Bush administration sought to block enforcement of the measure when inspectors wanted to visit Guantánamo.

Torture is not only a moral problem, but it has a precise legal meaning that most definitely encompasses waterboarding.

What $10 million will buy

It wouldn’t be fair to call this a direct connection. But follow the bouncing money.

The New York Times today runs a profile of Lisa Maria Falcone, a socialite who just gave $10 million to the High Line, an elevated railway in New York that’s been turned into a garden. Falcone’s husband, Philip Falcone, is the founder of Harbinger Capital, which owns 20 percent of the New York Times Co. The Times Co. is demanding that the Boston Newspaper Guild, the Boston Globe’s largest union, deliver $10 million in concessions.

To be clear, the Falcones are not legally, fiscally or ethically responsible for either the Globe or the problems the Times Co. is having in running it. But there’s a parallel here that’s too striking to let go unmentioned.

National news, local impact

Several weeks ago I spend half a Monday hanging out with Paul Bass (left), a veteran journalist who is the founder and editor of the New Haven Independent, a non-profit community news site.

Decisions by the U.S. Supreme Court come down on Mondays, and Bass was on tenterhooks waiting to see if the court would rule on Ricci v. DeStefano, the affirmative-action case involving New Haven firefighters.

It didn’t happen then, but it did today, and the Independent has a meaty, link-rich post on what the five-to-four decision in favor of white firefighters means both to the city and to the nomination of Judge Sonya Sotomayor, whose opinion was overruled.

The established daily, the New Haven Register, offers an extensive package of coverage as well.

Ironically, I’m writing this post from the office of the Batavian, an online-only newspaper in Batavia, N.Y., which, like the Independent, I’m reporting on for my book-in-progress.

Photo (cc) 2009 by Dan Kennedy.

On the road again

I just arrived in Batavia, N.Y., where I’ll be for the next few days. I’m doing some reporting for my book project on the Batavian, an online-only newspaper published by Howard Owens, the former director of digital publishing for GateHouse Media.

Owens and I are meeting tomorrow morning at the Pok-A-Dot. I’m also meeting with Tom Turnbull, publisher of Batavia’s Daily News, as well as a few community folks before heading back on Wednesday.

Internet access at the Holiday Inn where I’m staying seems pretty slow, so I’m not sure how that’s going to work out. In any case, expect blogging to be light.

GlobeReader makes a quiet debut

With little fanfare, the Boston Globe has unveiled a “preview” edition of GlobeReader, an attempt to produce an online newspaper that offers a better experience than the Web version. GlobeReader is slick and highly readable. Save for subtle differences in the fonts that are used, it looks exactly like Times Reader 2.0, which the New York Times unveiled last month. Both are built on the Adobe Air platform, which allows developers to build applications outside the context of the Web.

Unlike Times Reader, which you can subscribe to as a standalone product for $14.95 a month, GlobeReader is free but available only to print subscribers. You do not, however, have to be a seven-day subscriber — a Thursday-through-Sunday or Sunday-only subscription is sufficient.

That’s probably a smart move. Knowledgeable people have told me that more than half of the Globe’s advertising revenue comes from the Sunday paper. Still, Globe spokesman Bob Powers says that could change.

As for what we can expect once GlobeReader has moved beyond the “preview” stage, Powers writes:

We’ve chosen the term preview edition to reflect that GlobeReader is a brand new product for us, and to a large degree the industry, which we will continually improve based upon reader feedback. We want to make sure the customers help shape future editions. We are also opening GlobeReader Preview Edition only to subscribers because we do want to hear from our most loyal readers.

We also expect to add features such as crosswords, ‘news in video’, a ‘latest news’ update, and ’email to a friend’ in the upcoming weeks/months, as they become available.

[F]or formatting reasons we are not including features such as comics, TV grids, weather, and sports box scores. We will look to add these features to a large degree based on reader’s priorities.

A friend who works at the Globe told me recently that GlobeReader is actually a bigger technical challenge than Times Reader because of some peculiarities in the way the Globe is assembled. So I’d give it some settling-down time.

So what’s the business strategy? It seems to me that it’s a hedge against people canceling home delivery of the Globe altogether, especially now that prices have gone up quite a bit. The Globe benefits if people at least hold on to Sunday delivery; it may also benefit from not having to pay the printing and distribution costs of the considerably less lucrative Monday-through-Saturday editions.

It’s an interesting strategy and, combined with other delivery platforms, such as the $9.99-a-month Kindle edition, may help chart a path out of the current mess in which the newspaper business finds itself. Such projects are not going to be nearly enough, but they could help.